Introduction

At the beginning of the last century the genealogical method was thought to be a neutral tool of exposition, enabling the mapping of kinship data from ‘primitive’ societies by anthropologists. As Rivers wrote in 1910, ‘The genealogical method makes it possible to investigate abstract problems on a purely concrete basis’ (1968: 107). The idea that the methodological tools imported by the anthropologist might influence the image of ‘primitive’ society thereby produced was yet to be formulated, and there is a sense in which constructing genealogies remains legitimate anthropological business.

However, some anthropologists have come to realise that the genealogical method contains specifically English cultural resources that make its relationship to the ‘raw’ data it purports to represent anything but unproblematic. Teaching this method to Portuguese students, for example, led Bouquet to conclude that, ‘pedigree thinking was so important to English middle-class intellectuals that it was absorbed in the processes of making knowledge about other peoples’ (1993: 219). Bouquet has uncovered the ‘pedigree thinking’ behind the genealogical method, using the Tales of Beatrix Potter as an example of a cultural product that was contemporary with Rivers' work, and showing that the two contained the same ideological resources. Bouquet believes that the connotations of English animal breeding and pedigree were assimilated by the genealogical method and that, ‘These connotations include the control of procreation through keeping written records that enable the careful channelling of “blood” as a key to nobility’ (1993: 189).